Who I am: I am a theoretical linguist at the Austrian Institute for
Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) with
specializations in syntax, semantics and morphology, and language
area specializations in Arabic, German and English. View my full CV here.

What I do: Linguistics is the scientific
study of human language. What most contemporary linguists mean by
'human language' is not so much particular languages themselves as the
specialized ability humans have to speak a language, which
appears to be unique to our species (no non-humans speak, for example, Spanish) and
universal to our species (every human speaks one or another
language). Linguists
have discovered and documented substantial grammatical similarities among the
human languages (for some examples, see the Universals Archive at the
University of Konstanz with over 2000 entries). These similarities among unrelated languages point
to an explanation for the
uniqueness and universality of human language: certain grammatical
principles are innate knowledge, encoded in our genome, and drawn on by
young children as they develop the ability to speak a human
language. The idea that some abstract grammatical knowledge is
innate explains both why languages do not differ from one another
substantially (though superficial differences might make it look
like they do) as well as why children learn language so quickly and
accurately, well before they can do seemlingly simpler things like
tying their shoes. This innate abstract grammatical knowledge is
commonly referred to as 'Universal
Grammar'. Linguists who study Universal Grammar explore its content by comparing grammatical structures in different languages,
on the assumption that deep similarities among historically
unrelated languages reveal the innate cognitive principles that
make up Universal Grammar. My own research in this area has focused on cross-linguistic uniformity in degree
constructions, tense, quantifier interpretation, argument structure and possession (see project descriptions under 'research' to the
left).